Creativity Workshop For Underprivileged Children-“You can’t use up Creativity. The more you use, the more you have”

“You can’t use up Creativity. The more you use, the more you have”

Currently the present situation has made the children of all section under mental trauma because the children cannot go to their school and also not able to show creative side of them, the pandemic is a crisis for today’s children of all section and the fallout and crisis may follow them for the rest of their lives. The school are shut or closed are one of the most visible and controversial thing by which Covid-19 is affecting young children. According to UNESCO, the education of nearly 1.89 billion people in more than 195 countries has so far been affected that’s 85% of the world’s school-age children. Presently now also, there are still no definite plans for opening the schools of around half of these children. Since the poor families will be hardest hit by all of these effects, lockdowns are expected to widen the existing inequalities of income across the countries, with upcoming for years to come. Its disadvantaged children who pay the greatest price here, as they will fall the furthest behind in all sort from education to livelihood, and have the fewest resources available to grab once the pandemic threat has passed.

In this Covid times CRY Foundation and IFIM Business School have given us a challenging task to do something for underprivileged children so that in these lock down times they can enhance their creativity skills and teach them how creativity leads to new innovation in future times. So, the topic given us is “CREATIVITY WORKSHOP”. Children of all age have a certain knack for creativity, imagination and giving their imagination a proper shape gives them happiness. This very creativity can be used to determine their sense of reasoning and imagination. For example, conducting workshops where the children can be provided waste materials and create something from the waste materials, or clay art, or performing mime, improve, etc. A child's creative activity can help teachers to learn more about what the child may be thinking or feeling. Creativity also fosters mental growth in children by providing opportunities for trying out new ideas, and new ways of thinking and problem-solving. We will provide opportunities to children for creative play and creative thinking. We will start by providing activities that are based on the children's interests and ideas. This means learning how to listen intently to what children are saying. It is very helpful to tape record and transcribe children's conversations as well as take notes and review them with your co-teachers.

The approach we have taken to teach these underprivileged children of West Bengal about creativity is that we have decided to make further videos as suggested by our mentor like Origamis, craft things out of waste materials or things that are easily available to those children. So as a subgroup we proposed an idea to do a research on the topic and how we can do things. We then shared the DIY links and so that we can see if something can be done for the video part. We them decided to filter the video search by 5 min DIY toys on YouTube. All the members of our group made small 3 minutes video for teaching creativity, the theme was to teach them how we can make toys from waste materials and play with it. Some other member made other useful stuffs using the waste materials. The basic objectives we kept in mind before making videos for children are:-

• A new creative way to learn from the video.
• Pass time creative idea to execute.
• New way of learning new things.
• Origami help to learn new things quickly.
• Encouraging children to make their own choices.
• Make the learning through creative works more interesting and providing a platform for them to display their talents and making them aware about the platforms which are already available.

Now coming to the children interaction part since it was lockdown and we could not go and meet the children face to face but with the help of cry as well as technology we could able to meet and interact with the children through WhatsApp. The child which I interacted her name was was Apabrita Kolay, she was 9 years old and was in Class 3. She goes to Central Model School. She loves doing drawing. As a class 3 student her drawing was very much beautiful than an average student can do. Her father sell Plastic goodies and they have an earnings of 10000 rupees per month. She want to become a doctor in her life, but she loves to read comic book and story books. Due to restriction in the income they could not afford to buy her Comic and story book after all monthly expenses adjusting in 10,000 Rupees only. She is way much creative and likes to read poems and recites poems and storytelling. The most important lesson I got after interacting with underprivileged girl is that they have a joyful nature and were very talented. They have learned to live happy with limited resources. Each one of them carried the enthusiasm, curiosity and fun-loving attitude towards their dreams and aspirations. It was a great experience & contently satisfying task that we were very pleased to be a part of. After interacting with the children we as a group feel like we all have gone back to our childhood days. These things touched me the most.

In this immersion project my role was to make a video of how to make a flying bat. While making the video I have shown most easiest way of making Flying Bat and also explained the steps of making it in hindi so that child can learn it quickly. I hope that after watching the video the children might get excited to try this out at her home and she can also teach her friends also.

Through this creativity workshop and child interaction we had with poor child, out of 17 Sustainable Development Goals some of the goals which matched with our projects are as follows:-

• GOAL 4: Quality Education - This SDGs Goal 4 tells us that all the poor and underprivileged children have the right to get quality education from any institution or government schools. In this project CRY have given us the platform to contribute and provide certain education by through video form, which will definitely help the children to increase the skill of creativity and think that simple waste materials could be so handy to create stuffs out of it.

I would like to thank IFIM, CRY and our mentor’s Dilshaad madam and Kamalika mam for providing us this opportunity towards working on one of the most interesting topic of teaching creativity to economically poor children through a medium of creating video. Imparting students about creativity as this helped me a lot in terms of developing my communication skills, building of self-confidence while presenting and giving my insights towards this project, and most importantly being able to connect empathy with CRY Child Apabrita Kolay and to understand how well she is dealing with her life now as a happy soul and is being treated so well by CRY.